Benchmarking Engine Applications

This application showcases the OnlyBoth Benchmarking Engine. It answers the core benchmarking questions: (1) How are we doing?, (2) Where could we improve?, (3) What has changed?, and (4) Who's best in class?

This application makes use of publicly-available data on 3,143 counties and county-equivalents from seven different federal agencies and from the private theARDA.com, resulting in 108 data attributes for each county, covering health, policing, jobs, education, religion, employment, apartment rents, immigration, race, veterans, water usage, farmland, home ownership, and others. Read our blog post.

The U.S. Agency for International Development publishes a Collecting Taxes Database on the tax systems of the world's countries. The database describes 195 countries with 33 attributes relating to various metrics and traits. We downloaded the latest available version (2012-2013) as well as an earlier 2009-2010 version, in order to form derived attributes that express changes over a three-year time period.

This application makes use of public Nursing Home Compare data from Medicare.gov on over 15,000 U.S. nursing homes characterized by 300+ relating to nursing home geography, performance, deficiencies, ratings, ownership, management, etc.

This application makes use of Hospital Compare data from Medicare.gov on 4,803 U.S. hospitals characterized by 100 attributes relating to hospital performance, patient satisfaction, treatment outcomes, geography, etc. These are augmented by several hospital rankings from U.S. News and World Report.

To see how peer anonymization would work in commercial applications, try here instead. All peers will remain anonymous, except when this default is overriden by a specified rule, which in this case is this: A peer's identity will be revealed if the peer and the target hospital are both governmental. The commercial analogy is that a peer can be revealed if it shares the same owner, or is part of a benchmarking pool.

This application makes use of federal Department of Education IPEDS financials data, augmented with five college rankings from the open web, on 1,889 U.S. private, post-secondary educational institutions, ranging from Harvard University to the Belle Academy of Cosmetology. All of these institutions - or colleges for short - follow the FASB accounting standard, which makes their financials directly comparable.

Of the 151 college attributes, 101 have dollar values and 11 are financial ratios, such as net income ratio and net assets ratio.

Other Technology Applications (non-Benchmarking)

These applications were developed to explore the use of OnlyBoth's discovery and writing technologies for automated content creation, for the purposes of entertainment, marketing, or self-promotion.

Discover what makes a major league baseball player or team unique or special or how they compare to others. This application uses standard historical baseball data to discover insights and write up its factual conclusions.

The baseball application uses millions of data points (over 100,000 players and teams, each described by dozens of attributes). OnlyBoth algorithms turn this automatically into millions of words of insight about batters, pitchers, and teams and comparisons among them..

Discover what makes a college unique, special, surprising, or similar to others. This application cites a rich diversity of facts and opinions, from dozens of sources, to discover insights and write up its factual conclusions. If you don't like a particular fact, blame it on the source data (it might be in error) or blame the college itself.

The colleges application uses over 500,000 data (3,000+ colleges described by 180+ attributes). OnlyBoth algorithms turn this automatically into 30 Moby Dicks of insight about individual and pairings of colleges (37 Mbytes, 6 million words, and 75,000 paragraphs).